 Chapter 1 of Time Telling through the Ages Forward It was a moonless night in no man's land. A man in khaki stood silently waiting in a front-line trench. In the darkness his eyes were drawn, fascinated, to the luminous figures on the watch dial at his wrist. A splinter of pale light, which he knew to be the hour hand, rested upon the figure eleven. A somewhat longer splinter crept steadily from the figure twelve. Past eleven he whispered to himself, less than twenty minutes now. To the right and to the left of him he, now and then, could see his waiting comrades in the blackness of the trench, their outlines vaguely appearing and disappearing with the intermittent flares of distant star shells. He knew that they, too, were intent upon tiny figures in small, luminous circles and upon the steady, relentless progress of other gleaming minute hands, which moved in absolute unison with the one upon his own wrist. He knew also that far in the rear, clustered about their guns, where other comrades tensely counting off the passing minutes. At twenty minutes past eleven the artillery bombardment would begin and would continue until exactly midnight. Then would come the barrage, the protecting curtain of bursting shells behind which the khaki-clad figure and his companions would advance upon the enemy's trenches, perhaps also upon eternity. How strangely silent it seemed after the crashing chaos of the last few days. There were moments when the rumble of distant guns almost died away and he could hear the faint ticking of his timepiece or a whispered word out of the darkness near at hand. He likened the silence to the lull before his storm. Five minutes thus went by. In another fifteen minutes the fury of the bombardment would begin. It would doubtless draw an equally furious bombardment from the enemy's guns. At twelve-ten plus forty-five seconds he and his platoon were to go over the top and plunge into the inferno of no man's land. That was the moment set for the advance, the moment when the barrage would lift and move forward. The slender hand on the glowing dial stole steadily onward. It was ten minutes after now. Ten minutes after eleven just one hour plus forty-five seconds to wait. His thoughts flew back to his home in the great city beyond the sea. Ten minutes after eleven, why? That would be only ten minutes after six in New York. How plainly he could picture the familiar scenes of rushing bustling life back there. Crowds were now pouring into the subways and surface cars or climbing to the level of the Elbs. This was the third, the latest homeward wave. The five o'clock people had, for the most part, already reached their homes and were thinking about their dinner. The five thirties were well upon their way. How the millions of his native city and other cities and towns and even of the country districts all moved upon schedule, clocks and watches told them when to get up. When to eat their breakfasts. When to catch their trains. Reach their work. Eat their lunches and return to their homes. Newspapers came out at certain hours. Males were delivered at definite moments. Stores and mills and factories all began their work at specified times. What a tremendous activity there was back there in America and how smoothly it all ran. Smooth as clockwork. Why? You might almost say it ran by clockwork. The millions of watches in millions of pockets. The millions of clocks on millions of walls all running steadily together. These were what kept the complicated machinery of modern life from getting tangled and confused. Yes, but what did people do before they had such timepieces? Back in the very beginning before they had invented or manufactured anything. Far back in the days of the caveman even those people must have had some method of telling time. A bright star drew above the shadowy outline of a hill. At first the man in khaki thought that it might be a distant starshell but no, it was too steady and too still. Ah yes, the stars were there even in the very beginning and the moon and the sun they were as regular then as now. Perhaps these were the timepieces of his earliest ancestors. A slight rustle of anticipation stirred through the waiting line and his thoughts flashed back to the present. His eyes fixed themselves again on the ghostly splinters of light at his wrist. The long hand had almost reached the figure four the moment when the bombardment would begin. He and his comrades braced themselves and the night was shattered by the crash of artillery. Chapter 1 The Man, Animal and Nature's Timepieces The story of the watch that you hold in your hand today began countless centuries ago and is as long as the history of the human race. When our earliest ancestors living in caves noted the regular succession of day and night and saw how the shadows changed regularly in length and direction as day grew on toward night then was the first faint, feeble germ of the beginning of time reckoning and time measurement. The world was very, very young so far as man was concerned when there occurred some such scene as this. It is early morning, the soft red sandstone cliffs are bathed in the golden glow of dawn. As the great sun climbs higher in the eastern sky the sharply outlined shadow of the opposite cliff descends slowly along the western wall of the narrow canyon. A shaggy head appears from an opening half way up the cliff and is followed by the grotesque, stupid figure of a long-armed man, hairy and nearly naked, safe for a girl of skins. He grasps a sharp, thick stick to one end of which a sharpened stone has been bound by many crossing thongs and, without a word, he makes his way down among the bushes and stones toward the bed of the creek. Another head appears at the same opening in the cliff that of the brown-skinned woman with high cheekbones, a flat nose and tangled hair. She shouts after the retreating form of the man and he stops and turns abruptly. Then he points to the edge of the shadow far above his and, with a sweeping gesture, indicates a large angular rock lying in the bed of the stream nearby, apparently understanding the woman nods and the man soon disappears into the brush. The far-noon wears along and the line of shadow creeps down the face of the canyon wall until it falls at last across the angular rock against which the dashing waters of the stream are breaking. The woman who has been moving about near the cave opening begins to look expectant and to cast quick glances up and down the canyon. Presently the rattle of stones caught her ear and she sees the long-armed man picking his way down a steep trail. He still carries his stone-headed club in one hand while from the other there swings by the tail the body of a small, furry animal. Her eyes flesh-hungryly and she shows her strong white teeth in a grin of anticipation. Perhaps it has not been hard to follow the meaning of this little drama of primitive human need. Our own needs are not so very different even in this day, although our manners and methods have somewhat changed since the time of the cavemen. Like ourselves this savage pair awoke with sharpened appetite, but unlike ourselves they had neither pantry nor grocery store to supply them. Their meal to be, which was looking for its own breakfast among the rocks and trees, must be found and killed for the superior needs of mankind and the hungry woman had called after her mate in order to learn when he expected to return. No timepieces were available but that great timepiece of nature, the sun by which we still test the accuracy of our clocks and watches and a shadow falling upon a certain stone served the need of this primitive cave dweller in making and keeping an appointment. The sun has been from the earliest days the master of time. He answered the cavemen's purpose very well. The rising of the sun meant that it was time to get up. His setting brought darkness and the time to go to sleep. It was a simple system but then society in those days was simple and strenuous. For example, it was necessary to procure a new supply of food nearly every day as prehistoric man knew little of preserving methods. Procuring food was not so easy as one might think. It meant long and crafty hunts for game and journeys in search of fruits and nuts. All this required daylight. By night time the cavemen was ready enough to crawl into his rock home and sleep until the sun and his clamoring appetite called him forth once more. In fact his life was very like that of the beasts and the birds. But of course he was man after all. This means that a human brain was slowly developing behind his sloping forehead and he could not stop progressing. After a while, a long while probably we find him and his fellows gathered together into tribes and fighting over the possession of hunting grounds or what not after the amiable human fashion. Thus society was born and with it organization. Tribal warfare implied working together. Working together required planning ahead and making appointments. Making appointments demanded the making of them by something, by some kind of a timepiece that could indicate more than a single day since the daily position of light and shadows was now no longer sufficient. Man looked to the sky again and found such a timepiece. Next to the sun the moon is the most conspicuous of the heavenly objects. Its name means the measure of time. As our fast ancestors perceived the moon seemed to have the strange property of changing shape. Sometimes it was a brilliant disk sometimes a crescent sometimes it failed to appear at all. These changes occurred over and over again always in the same order and the same number of days apart. What then could be more convenient than for the men inhabiting neighboring valleys to agree to meet at a certain spot with arms and with several days provisions at the time of the next full moon. Moonlight being also propitious for a night attack. For this and other reasons the moon was added to the sun as a human timepiece and man began to show his mental resources. He was able to plan ahead. Note however that he was not concerned with measuring the passage of time but merely with fixing upon a future date. It was not a question of how long but of when. This presumptuous two-legged fighting animal from whom we are descended and many of whose instincts we still retain began to enlarge his warfare and thereby to improve his organization. For the sake of his own safety he learned to combine with his fellows finding strength in numbers like the wolves in the pack or like ants and bees finding in the combined efforts of many a means of gaining for each individual more food and better shelter than he could win for himself alone. For example it was possible that a neighboring tribe instead of waiting to be attacked was planning an attack upon its own account. It would not do to be surprised at night. Centuries must be established to keep watch while others slept and to weaken their comrades in case of need. Our very word watch is derived from the old Anglo-Saxon word weekend meaning wake and yet people who try to watch for long at a stretch would be apt to doze. They must be relieved at regular times and was a matter of necessity but how could one measure time at night? Where man has been confronted with a present problem he has generally found its solution. Probably in this case the stars gave him a clue. If the sky were clear their positions would help to divide the night into watches of convenient length. Thus did primitive man begin to study the skies. No longer a mere animal he was beginning quite unconsciously to give indications of becoming a student. End of chapter 1 Chapter 2 The Land Between the Rivers Now we must jump over ages so vast in duration that all of our recorded history is by comparison the nearest fragment of time. During the prehistoric period known to us only by certain bones drawings and traces of tombs and dwellings and by a few rude implements, weapons and ornaments we must think of the human family as developing very very slowly groping in the dawn of civilization while it ate and slept, hunted and fought and gradually spread over various regions of the earth. It was in this interval also that man learned the use of fire and the fashioning of various tools. His club gave place to the spear, the knife and the arrowhead weapons that were made at first by chipping flakes of flint to a sharp edge. Then as his knowledge and skill slowly increased he learned to work the softer metals and made his weapons and his tools of bronze. Meanwhile he was taught by observing in nature to tame and to breed animals for his food and use and to plant near home what crops he wished to reap instead of seeking them where they grew in a wild state. Thus he became a herdsman and farmer. He no longer lived in caves or rude huts but in a low flat-roofed house built of heavy rough stone and later of stones hewn into shape or of bricks baked in the burning sunshine. Stone and clay carved or molded into images and the colored earth smeared into designs upon his walls gave him the beginnings of art and from drawing rude pictures of simple objects as a child begins to draw even before knowing what it means to write primitive man came at last to the greatest power of all the art of writing. Through all this age man continued to regulate his expanding affairs by the time pieces of the sky the sun the moon and the stars. He divided time roughly into days and parts of days into nights and watches of the night into moons and seasons determining the latter probably by the migration of birds the budding of trees and flowers the falling of leaves and other happenings in nature but never guessing how greatly interested future generations would be in the way he did things he has left only a few records of his activities and these have been preserved by the nearest accident the historian and the press agent were the inventions of later days. Thus we come down the ages to a date about 4000 BC at the very beginning of recorded history and to one of the most ancient civilizations in the world that of the region which we now call Mesopotamia Mesopotamia lies in southwestern Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and not far from the traditional site of the Garden of Eden the name by which we know it comes from the Greek and means the land between the rivers but the people who dwelt there at the time to which we refer called it the land of Shinar this is the region in which long afterwards so the Bible tells us Abraham left his native town Ur of the Chaldees to make his pioneer journey to Palestine this is the land where the great cities of Babylon and Nineveh afterward arose Babylon where Daniel interpreted the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar and Nineveh who hence the Assyrians the fierce conquerors of the ancient world came down like a wolf on the fold against the peaceful kingdom of Judah it is the land where thousands of years later the famous Arab capital of Baghdad was built it is the land of Harun al-Rashid and the Arabian Knights and the land which the British army conquered in a remarkable campaign against the Turks and Germans Mesopotamia is a land of colour brilliant life, wonders and romance many students and statesmen believe that it will in days to come grow fruitful and populous again that it will once more be great among the countries of the earth it is a flat region with wide stretching plains for the most part there are no hills to limit the view of the skies and the heavens are brilliant upon starry nights in this favoured portion of the earth a high civilization had already been developed in the very earliest days of which we have authentic historic record the caveman type had long disappeared and had been forgotten people were already living in well built cities of brick and stone their houses were low and flat roofed but the cities were surrounded with high and massive walls to protect them from enemies and here and there within rose great square towers which were also temples perhaps the famous tower of Babel was one of these for Babel of course is another name for Babylon and its people are known to have worshipped on the tops of towers as if by so doing they could reach nearer to their gods the ancient Chaldeans were religious by nature and because the skies contained the greatest things of which they knew they identified many of their gods with the sun, the moon and the stars and they worshipped these in their temples thus the sun was the god Shamash the moon was Sin Jupiter was Marduk Venus was Ishtar Mars was Nergal Mercury was Nebo and Saturn was Ninib in consequence their priests came to give much of their time to a study of the movements of the stars these priests who were shrewd and learned men discovered a great deal but they kept their knowledge closely within the circle of their cast learning was not for everyone in those days because the priests posed as magicians able to interpret dreams to explain signs and to foretell the future this brought them much revenue as prophets they were not unmindful of prophets when we consider that these astrologer astronomers did not have telescopes or our other modern instruments it is marvelous to see how many of the laws of the heavenly bodies they really did find out for themselves books could be filled with the story of their discoveries for example, they observed that the sun slowly changed the points at which it rose and set during certain months the place of sunrise traveled northward and at the same time the sun rose higher in the sky and at noon was more nearly overhead at this time the days were also longer because the sun was above the horizon more of the time and then it was summer during certain other months the sun traveled south again and all these conditions were reversed the days grew shorter and shorter and it was winter this is of course exactly what the sun appears to do here and now and we may observe it for ourselves but these Babylonian priests were the first to study these phenomena and accomplish something by applying their reasoning powers to the facts that presented themselves they took the time which was consumed in this motion from the furthest north to the furthest south and return and from that worked out their year in order to calculate time they next devised the zodiac a sort of belt encircling the heavens and showing the course of the sun and the location of twelve constellations or groups of stars through which he would be seen to pass if his light did not blot out theirs they divided the region of these twelve constellations into the same number of equal parts consequently the sun passing from any given point around the heavens to the same point occupied in so doing an amount of time that was arbitrarily divided into twelfths but they also devised another twelve part division of the year they noticed that the moon went through her phases from full moon to full moon in about thirty days so one moon or one month corresponded with the passage of the sun through one sign of the zodiac our own word month might have been written moonth since that is its meaning that gave them a year of twelve months each month having thirty days or three hundred and sixty days in all then from the seven heavenly bodies which they had identified with seven great gods they got the idea of a week of seven days one day for the special worship of each god and named for him in like manner they divided the day and the night each into twelve hours and the hour into sixty minutes and these again into sixty seconds the choice of sixty was not a chance shot or accident it was carefully selected for practical reasons since these old astronomers were wise and level headed men no lower number can be divided by so many other numbers as can sixty just look at your watch for a moment and notice how simply and naturally the minutes divided into fives fit into place between the figures for the hours because sixty divides evenly by fifteen and thirty we have quarter hours and half hours therefore we should realize with a bit of gratitude that we owe these divisions of time of which we still make use to the ancient magician priests of Babylon and Chaldea thousands and thousands of years ago in doing all this these early scientists developed at the same time an elaborate system of so-called magic by which they pretended to foretell future events and the destinies of men born on certain days this was an important part of their priest craft and probably it was not the least profitable part in fact the priests called themselves Magi meaning wise men in their language and our word magic is derived from Magi this magic or prophetic study of the stars we call astrology to distinguish it from the true science of astronomy but mingled with it all these priests possessed a wonderful amount of genuine scientific knowledge their year of three hundred and sixty days was of course five days too short as they presently found out for themselves in six years the difference would amount to thirty days which was exactly the length of one of their months so they corrected the calendar very easily by doubling the month Adar once in six years thus every sixth year contained thirteen months instead of twelve that was the origin of the leap year principle which we still use although more accurately it can be seen that with all their superstition and their befooling of other people the priests themselves were by no means ignorant they were really keen observers this calendar by which we still measure the years and the seasons is so interesting a thing that it is worthwhile to pause for a moment in our story in order to trace out its later development the Babylonian calendar remained practically the same up to the time of Julius Caesar only a few years before the Christian epic the names of the months had naturally been changed into the Latin language and the Romans instead of doubling a whole month had come to add the extra five days to several months one day to each that is the reason for some of our months having thirty one days when Caesar was dictator of Rome it had become known that the year of exactly three hundred sixty five days was still a little too short it should have been three hundred sixty five and one quarter so Caesar in reforming the calendar provided that the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth and eleventh months should be given thirty one days each and that the others should have thirty days except in the case of February which should have its thirtieth day only once in four years a little later his successor the emperor Augustus after whom the month of August is named decided that his month must be as long as July which was Julius Caesar's month therefore he stole a day from February and added one to August then he changed the following months by making September and November thirty day months and giving thirty one days to October and December the Julian calendar with these changes by Augustus remained in use until the year AD 1582 nearly a century after the discovery of America then it was learned that the average year of three hundred sixty five and one quarter days was still not exactly right according to the motion of the earth around the sun the exact time is three hundred sixty five days five hours forty eight minutes and forty six seconds being eleven minutes and fourteen seconds less than three hundred sixty five and one quarter days when therefore we add a day to the year every four years as Caesar commanded we are really adding too much this excess was corrected by Pope Gregory XII in 1582 when he changed the calendar so that the last year of a century should be a leap year only when its number could be divided evenly by four hundred thus seventeen hundred eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred were not leap years though the year 2000 will be this new calendar which is the one now generally in use in most of the world is known as the Gregorian calendar thus the plan and principle of the calendar as well as our smaller divisions of time in spite of the small changes by Caesar and Gregory have remained from the Babylonian days down to the present and we have done nothing to their system in all these thousands of years except incidentally to correct it only once in history have the measures of the ancient calendar been set aside that was in France at the time of the revolution when the French people their passionate hatred of all the traditional things that reminded them of their past sufferings invented a new calendar in which they changed the names of months and days and counted the years from 1792 the first of their liberty they also abolished all Sundays and religious festivals and divided the day into ten hours this played havoc with timekeeping caused great confusion watches and clocks were made with one circle of numbers for the new hours and another within on which were shown the old hours which people could understand but this complication lasted only a few years for the traditional system was soon restored to return again to the era of the first calendar while the wise men of Mesopotamia engaged in mingling science and mystery another civilization, the Egyptian was developing upon the banks of the Nile and passing through much of the same stages in due course the Persians conquered both Mesopotamia and Egypt and absorbed their knowledge still later the wonderful Greek nation combined astronomy with mathematics in a way which makes us wonder to this day this is the way in which civilization has grown race after race during century after century has added its new knowledge and discoveries to that which has been learned before it is interesting to note that the astronomy of the Babylonians appears to have been paralleled independently by other ancient civilizations between which there was no apparent possibility of intercourse the Chinese in the east and the Aztecs of Mexico on the other side of the world invented practically the same astronomical instruments as the Babylonians and made similar discoveries all methods of indicating time have been stepped upon the long road which has led to the making of modern time pieces the progressive Greeks did not permit knowledge to be monopolized by the priesthood and probably their common people knew more about the stars than most of the population of America do to this day sailors possessed no compasses but they voyaged very skillfully with the guidance of the stars while farmers lacking our modern weather reports and crop bulletins to govern their planting and harvesting by the positions of the heavenly bodies in one sense this is time telling and in another it is not but our ideas of time and astronomy have always been so closely associated that it is hard to think of one apart from the other this is because the movements of the earth which produce night and day and the changes of the seasons the supreme court of time our final standard for its measurement and since we cannot see the earth move we judge of its motion by the apparent movement of the heavenly bodies just as we realize the movement of a train by watching the landscape rush past us as we go some of the great Greek scientists by the way had even learned to foretell eclipses of the sun according to Herodotus the one which occurred on May 28th in the year 585 BC was predicted by Thalus of Miletus one of the famous seven wise men this event was also celebrated because of another interesting association it stopped a battle between the armies of the Midis and the Lydians perhaps we can guess at what happened undoubtedly the eclipse was interpreted by the armies as a sign of divine anger for the ancients identified many of the forces and objects of nature as gods and Phoebus Apollo who it was believed daily drove his flaming chariot across the sky was the great divinity of the sun furthermore these gods were very apt to meddle with happenings upon the earth particularly with wars as anyone who has read the Iliad will recall imagine then the two armies about to go to battle when suddenly something appeared to go wrong with the sun there to their amazement in a cloudless sky a dimming shadow touched the edge of the sun's shining disk and began slowly to blot it out the warriors forgot to fight each other and stared in terror at the sky the sun dwindled to a crescent the weird twilight fell upon the earth finally the last thread of brightness disappeared leaving a dull circle in the sky surrounded by faint bands of light the gloom of night fell upon the ground birds and animals went to their rest no further evidence was needed by the superstitious and frightened soldiers it must be true that Phoebus Apollo was grievously angered and they forthwith laid down their arms the sun god of course soon showed his approval of this action by coming back into the sky this is only one of many tales which might be told to show the state of superstition in those days learning then was confined to the few and in many instances was used to mystify or terrorize the mass of the people and thus keep them submissive at best new ideas were slow to grow or to be believed for example Pythagoras the great Greek philosopher of the 6th century BC believed the earth to be a globe but it was not until Columbus discovered America 20 centuries later that people generally began to know that it was not flat even in these modern days of the public school the press, the telephone, the telegraph the wireless and other means for the widespread distribution of knowledge how slowly does truth find its way to acceptance to this day superstition is by no means dead even Mark Twain who scoffed at superstition all his life often said that as he came into the world with Haley's Comet in the year 1835 so he expected to die in 1910 the year of the Comet's next appearance strangely enough his half-gesting prophecy was fulfilled for he really did die in that year astronomers today can figure out in advance what is to happen in the heavens with an exactness which would have seemed magical in olden times and is hardly less astonishing even now their power is largely due to improved scientific instruments, proficiency in mathematics and greater accuracy in the measurement of time not only is the date of an eclipse of the sun now known in advance but so also is the exact path of the shadow across the world and the instant of its appearance in any given place we now have glanced briefly at a few of the features of early humanity's dependence upon the clocks of nature and the way in which they influenced its manner of life we still depend upon these great primeval time pieces and we do it for the most part unconsciously for our master clocks must still be set by the motion of the heavenly bodies that motion which now we know to be really the revolution of our earth is still the legislator and supreme court of time but we have learned to make and carry everywhere a wonderful machine whose revolving wheels and pointing hands keep trist with the stars in the heavens and move to the rhythm of wheeling worlds and so familiar is this talisman of man's making that we forget to look beyond it or think of time at all save as the position of the hands upon the dial we carry with us carelessly a toy which tells tales upon the solar system our watch is a pocket universe End of Chapter 2 Recording by Linda Johnson Chapter 3 of time telling through the ages this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Time telling through the ages by Harry Chase Brearley Chapter 3 How Man Began to Model After Nature We now have reached a point far ahead of our story and must take a backward step We have been seeing man as a mere observer of nature but man doesn't stop with nature as he finds it his man brain drives him forward he must make improvements of his own Animals may live and die and leave no trace save their bones which for the most part soon disappear but man always leaves traces behind him He has always interfered with nature or rather has muddled after nature seeing in her work the revelations of principles and laws that he might utilize in varying ways for his own benefit and progress Our material civilization is built up from the accumulated results of all this study and control of nature by hundreds of millions of busy brains and hands through tens of thousands of years Here we are then living in a sense on the top of the ages of human history like the dwellers on a coral island Hundreds of generations have toiled to raise the vast structure for us like the little coral polyps which build their own lives into the mass yet we take it all as a matter of course and rarely give a thought to the marvelous ways by which it has come about You may have just gladstet your watch To you perhaps a watch has always seemed merely a small mechanism which was bought in a store That is true and yet remember this the first manufacturer who had a hand in producing that watch for you may have been a caveman In order to appreciate this development let us return therefore for another rapid view of prehistoric times life in its crudest form one day much like another a scanty population huddled in little groups in places naturally sheltered the simplest physical needs to be provided for little thought of the past or care for the future time reckoning reduced to the single thought of appointment no reason for measuring intervals in these and other respects antiquity presented the greatest possible contrast to our complicated modern life the long-armed man of our first chapter noticed that as the sun moved the shadows of the cliff also moved as did all other shadows as he formed habits of regularity it was natural for him to perform a certain daily act when perhaps the shadow of a certain tree touched upon a certain stone this would be a natural sundial but a thinner sharper shadow would be easier to observe suppose therefore that some successor to the long-armed man set up a pole in some open space and laid a stone to mark the spot where the shadow fell when the sun was highest in the heavens that would be an artificial sundial a device deliberately planned to accomplish a certain purpose the man who first took such a step was probably the first manufacturer who had a hand in supplying you with your watch the shaggy mammoth the terrible saber-toothed tiger and the eohippus, the small ancestor of our modern horse must have been familiar sites in time recording at the hands of some rude unconscious inventor thus began the long story of its development one stone reached by the moving shadow would mark only one point of time each day why not place two stones, three stones or even more and get more markings such a procedure would be more useful because it would indicate the time of other happenings in the course of the day the sun would pass across the skies and the shadow must travel around the pole what more natural than to place the stones in a circle and get a series of these markings of course as the ages passed life became more complex not complex as we would consider it today as compared with its rude beginnings new habits were formed new needs developed new activities were undertaken at different periods here then was the sprouting of modern civilization the beginning of that specializing of each man in his own particular direction that has carried the world to its present high state of expertness in so many fields slowly, steadily and inevitably this principle of specialization has been developed with the increase of laws for example certain men came to give them special study and then to sell their knowledge and skill to other men who had no opportunity for such study in course of time the aggregation of laws became so great that these lawyers were forced to specialize among themselves today therefore we find a number of classes of law specialists the same thing is true of doctors who have limited their practice until we find those who treat the eye only or the lungs, the stomach or the teeth even the treatment of the teeth has been subdivided some dentists limiting themselves to extraction and some of them even to the treatment of a single disease of the gums engineering too has branched like a tree and the branches have branched again and yet again electrical engineering has come to be divided into so many departments that telephone companies employ specialists in many branches of the engineering profession we find the same conditions in any field of thought or activity all commercial and industrial life is divided and subdivided labor is specialized, writing is specialized teaching is specialized even warfare has become a contest between many kinds of trained specialists each employing the tools of his trade and every man's outlook upon life is directed chiefly toward the particular corner of the particular field that he has fitted himself to occupy the first step toward this complex condition of the modern world was taken when each man stopped getting his own food making his own weapons and providing for all his individual wants without dependence upon others when he learned to exchange that which he could best produce for that which some other man had learned to make better than he the human race unconsciously turned away from the status of the birds and the beasts and began the long slow upward climb that history records it was then through trade, barter and exchange that man began to acquire the manners of civilized life trade itself became a specialized activity and dealers who did nothing but buy and sell but themselves produced no material goods found that a special calling was rightfully theirs the modern merchant is the heir of one of the first specialists in human activity and the misunderstood work of the so-called middleman is one of the bases of modern civilization a necessary and honorable calling civilization is a thing of the spirit but it has the support of material things and it has been truly said that the degree of a people's civilization can be measured by the multiplicity of its needs the savage is content with food, shelter and a covering for his body but every step in civilization's progress has a more and more complex material accompaniment and these interwoven relationships of modern life in which the question of time is a most important factor can only be sustained through the use of accurate time measure in other words, modern civilization leans upon the watch but here again we have run somewhat ahead of our story which as a matter of fact had only reached the point of primitive sundials but this anticipation will be excused because of the importance of emphasizing that the growing interdependence of human relations had made it necessary to take into account the convenience of a greater and greater number of people and this involved closer and closer time recording in smaller divisions of time by more exact methods the sundial underwent so many changes that a volume would be needed to describe them all for example, it was found that the shadow of an upright stick or stone varied from day to day because as we have already noticed the sun rises farther north in summer in the northern hemisphere than it does in winter so the mark for a certain hour would change as the season changed and the dial would not indicate time accurately Beroces, a Chaldean historian and priest of Bell or Baal, a god of the old Babylonian lived about the year 250 BC and hit upon a very ingenious way of solving this difficulty he made the dial hollow like the inside of a bowl into this the shadow was cast by a little round ball or bead at the end of a pointer that stood horizontally out over the bowl now the sky itself is like a great bowl or inverted hemisphere and how so ever the sun moved upon it the shadow would move in the same way upon the inside of the bowl or hemisphere and by drawing lines in the bowl similar to the lines of longitude upon the map the hours could be correctly measured the hemicycle of Beroces as it was called remained in use for centuries and was the favorite form of sundial all through the classic period of Greece and Rome Cicero had one at his villa near Tusculum and one was found in 1762 at Pompeii but the hemicycle was not easy to make unless it were fairly small and if small it was not very easy to read you can see that a shadow which traveled only a few inches in a whole day would move so slowly that one could hardly see it go and the shadow of a round ball is not a clear sharp pointed thing like the hand of a watch whose exact position can be seen however small it may be besides the ancients were not very particular about exact timekeeping they had no trains to catch and in their leisurely lives convenience counted for more than doing things on the minute so they still continued using the upright pointer which the Greeks called the nomon meaning the one who knows Cleopatra's needle and other Egyptian obelisks may also have been used as huge nomons to cast their shadows upon mammoth dials for they were dedicated to the sun with an object of such great size the shadow would move rapidly enough to be followed easily by the eye but of course its motion would be irregular because of the flat surface of the dial the word dial by the way comes from the Latin deus meaning day because it determined the divisions of the day then there was applied the idea of making the shadow move over a hollow space such as a walled courtyard going down one side across and up the other side as the sun went up across and down the sky sometimes light was used instead of shadow the place being partially roofed over and a single beam of light being admitted through a small hole at the southern end men kept track of the motion of this beam as it touched one point after another during the day do you remember the miracle of the dial of Ahaz mentioned in the Bible? Hezekiah the king was sick and despondent and would not believe that he could ever recover from his illness or prevail against his enemies so the prophet Isaiah in an effort to comfort the royal sufferer made the shadow return backward ten degrees upon the dial of Ahaz as a sign from heaven that his prophecy of the king's future recovery was true you will find the story in Isaiah chapter 38 this dial of Ahaz was probably a curved flight of steps rising like the side of a huge bowl at one end of the palace courtyard with either a shadow cast by a pointer overhead or a beam of light admitted through an opening it can be seen that this and similar great dials were applications of the hemicycle idea on a large scale according to our chronology the dial of Ahaz must have been built during the 8th century BC although the sundial period was of course many hundreds of years older than this yet the story of this Hebrew king and prophet is the first authentic reference to a sundial which has been discovered however the final improvement of the dial was made when it was discovered that by slanting the pointer or nomon exactly toward the north pole of the sky the point where the north star appears at night the sun's shadow could be cast upon a flat surface with accurate results in indicating time this may sound simple but if you will look at a sundial such as may still be found in gardens you will see that the lines of the hours and minutes are laid out on certain carefully calculated angles you will realize that people had to acquire considerable knowledge before they were capable of making such calculations the whole subject of dial making is so complicated that in 1612 there was published a big book of 800 pages on the subject the angles of the lines of the sundial must be different for different latitudes it took that strong arm race of ancient times the Romans a hundred years to learn this fact the Romans at this time were developing their civilization from the shoulders downward while the Greeks and some of the Greek colonies developed theirs from the shoulders upward Rome was a burly power with powerful military muscles whatever it wanted it went out and took at the point of the sword as some nations have endeavored to do in latter days thus the city of Rome became a vast storehouse of miscellaneous loot a fruit of other men's brains and hands some conqueror of that day took back with him a sundial from the Greek colony of Sicily this was set up in Rome where nobody realized that even the power of Rome's armies was not able to transplant the angle of the sun as it's shown upon Sicily far to the southward it was nearly 100 years before these self-satisfied robbers found that they had been getting the wrong time record from the stolen instrument thus the original owners had a form of belated revenge could they but have known it one of the largest of all the sundials was the one set up by the Roman emperor Augustus when he returned from his Egyptian wars bringing with him an obelisk not unlike the one which now stands near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, New York City if you can imagine this Egyptian obelisk with its strange hieroglyphic characters upon its four sides surrounded by a great dial with the figures of the hours marked upon its surface you will get an idea of the size of this huge timepiece however it was probably more picturesque than valuable as a timekeeper there is an important difference between clocks and sundials aside from the self-evident one of the difference in their construction clock time is based on what is called mean time if we study the almanac table of times of sunrises and sunsets and count the number of hours from sunrise of one day to sunrise of the next we find it is rarely exactly 24 hours but usually a few minutes more or less while the average for the whole year is 24 hours the clock is constructed to keep uniform time based on this average length of day the sundial time marks apparent time the actual varying length of each day the sundial time therefore is nearly always some minutes ahead or behind that of a clock the greatest discrepancy being about 16 minutes for a few days in November there are however four days in the year when the clock and the sundial agree perfectly in the time they indicate these days are April 15th, June 15th, September 1st and December 24th when in the 18th century clocks and watches began to come into widespread use sundials fell into neglect except as an appropriate bit of ornament in gardens at Castle Town in the Isle of Man is a remarkable sundial with 13 faces dating from 1720 it was usual to place on sundials appropriate motos expressing a sentiment exciting inspiration or giving a warning to better living a dial that used to be at Paul's Cross London bore an inscription in Latin which translated means I count none but the sunny hours in an old sweet-scented garden in Sussex was a sundial with a plate bearing four motos each for its own season after darkness light alas how swift I wait whilst I move so passes life sometimes short familiar proverbs were used like all things do wax and wane the longest day must end make hay while the sun shines it is told of Lord Bacon that without intending to do so he furnished the motto born by a dial that stood in the old temple gardens in London a young student was sent to him for a suggestion for the motto of the dial then being built his lordship was busy at work in his rooms when the messenger humbly and respectfully made his request there was no answer a second request met with equally oppressive silence and seeming ignorance of even the existence of the speaker at last when the petitioner ventured a third attack on the attention of the venerable chancellor Bacon looked up and said sharply Sira, be gone about your business a thousand thanks my lord was the unexpected reply the very thing for the dial nothing could be better we see that the principle of the sundial has been recognized and utilized for many centuries indeed we still find sundials placed in gardens and parks although we rarely take the trouble to look to them for the time like the dinosaur and the saber-toothed tiger they have had their day they have been forced to give way to devices that overcame some of their objections therefore we must not linger too long upon what is, after all, a closed chapter in the history of time recording End of Chapter 3 Recording by Linda Johnson Chapter 4 of Time Telling Through the Ages This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Time Telling Through the Ages by Harry Chase Brearley Chapter 4 Telling Time by the Water-Thief Now we must take another backward step of thousands of years. In considering the subject of time recording it seems necessary to wear a pair of mental seven-league boots for we must often pass back and forth over great periods at single strides. While men were still improving the sundial its disadvantages were already recognized and search was being made for some other means of telling time. Suppose, for example, that one had only a sundial about the house. How would one be able to tell time after sunset or on a dark day? How would one know the hour if he were surrounded by tall buildings or a thick growth of trees? And it might be very necessary to tell time under any of these conditions. Then again merely as a question of accuracy the sundial was not always reliable. It would get badly out of the way if used by travellers since different markings were needed for different latitudes. While on ship-board the motion of the waves would cause the shadow to swing around in the most bewildering manner. Even under ideal conditions it was never absolutely exact because the apparent motion of our steady-gated old sun is not quite as dependable as most of us imagine. Astronomers find that they must allow for what they call equation of time in order to make their calculations come out true. The question need not be discussed at this point, but it can be seen that as humanity left its earliest carefree days and began to get busy, and hurried and anxious over its affairs, it came to feel that after all the sundial was not altogether sufficient for its needs. For this reason we are now taking a third big backward step, returning this time not to the cave man, but to ancient Babylon and Egypt, probably not less than 2700 years ago and possibly much longer. In this way we meet the Clepsidra. The Clepsidra was an interesting instrument and it had an interesting name which meant the Thief of Water and came from two Greek words meaning Thief and Water. You can trace this in our words Cleptomaniac and Hydrant. We shall now examine a timepiece that was much more nearly a machine than was the simple shade casting sundial. The original idea was simple enough. At first it was merely that of a vessel of water having a small hole in the bottom so that the liquid dripped out drop by drop. As the level within the jar was lowered it showed the time upon a scale. Thus if the hole were so small and the vessel were so large that it would require 24 hours for the water to drip away at an absolutely steady rate, it may be seen that the side of the vessel might easily have been marked with 24 divisions to indicate the hours. It may also be seen that the water would drip as rapidly at night or in shadow as in sunlight. And the Clepsidra could be used indoors which the sundial could not although it required attention in that it must be regularly refilled and the orifice must always be kept completely open because the slightest stoppage would retard the rate of dripping and the clock would run slow. The sun which with the other heavenly bodies had therefore been the sole reliance of the human race in its time reckoning could now be ignored and the would-be timekeeper called to his aid another mighty servant from the forces of nature, that of gravitation. The most interesting human fact however about the Clepsidra is that it involved an entirely different conception of the marking of time. Now it was not so much a question of when as of how long. A good sundial set in a proper position would always indicate three o'clock when it was three o'clock but the Clepsidra might do no such thing. It would merely show how many hours had elapsed since last it was filled and the steady drip drip drip of the escaping water could and did lower the surface quite as evenly at one time of day as at another. We have already seen that the first purpose in marking time was merely for making appointments but the Clepsidra shows that with its invention mankind had already made some progress toward a new point of view. One important factor in this change was the very practical need of telling time at night in stormy weather or indoors where the sundial could not be used. The Clepsidra on the other hand worked equally well at any hour or place and in all sorts of weather. Nevertheless it too proved to have certain faults. After a time people noticed the interesting fact that water ran faster from a full vessel than from one which was nearly empty. This was of course because of the greater pressure. Since such a variation interfered with calculations they hit upon the idea of a double vessel the larger one below containing a float which rose as the vessel filled thus marking the hours upon the scale and the smaller one above the one from which the water dripped being kept constantly filled to the point of overflow. This improved form of Clepsidra opened a field of fascinating possibilities in time recording. It gave the chance to make use of a machine. There is perhaps no more interesting point in studying human development than to see the steady, inevitable way in which mankind from its cave dwelling days has tended toward machinery. Roughly this progress may be characterized as of three stages. First primitive man, an upright standing animal, naked, unarmed, weak as compared with some creatures, slow as compared with others, clumsy as compared with still others, a creature with many physical disadvantages but with the best brain in the animal kingdom. Second the tool-using man who had begun to grasp weapons and to fashion implements thus supplementing his natural abilities by artificial means. Third the machine-making man who has fashioned to himself a mechanical body of incredible powers that is to say he has learned to intensify his own powers through artificial means which he has invented as when he made the telescope to give himself greater vision. He has made inventions by means of which he can outrun the antelopes, outfly the birds, out swim the fishes, out gaze the eagles, and overmatch the elephants in sheer physical force. He can turn night into day, can send his voice across the continent, can strike crushing blows at a distance of many miles, and can carry the movements of the stars in his pocket. Some phases of this third stage were foreshadowed when man first applied wheels and pulleys to his klepsidra. Here then was water, steadily raised or lowered by means of uniform dropping. Here was a float whose motion was controlled by that of the water. Here in fact was water power with a means for applying it. Attach a cord to the float, cause it to turn a wheel by use of the pulley principle, and the motion of the wheel would indicate the time. Still better, rig up a turning pointer, increase its speed through the use of toothed gear wheels, place it in front of a stationary disc divided to indicate the hours, and now the apparatus looked not unlike a modern clock, or attach a bell, and let it be caused to ring at a certain point in the motion. What was that but an alarm clock? Cessibus of Alexandra was the one who is believed first to have applied the toothed wheels to the klepsidra, and this was about 140 BC. Klepsidrae were expensive, of course. Accurate mechanical work was never cheap until modern times. Cunning craftsmen spent their time upon costly decorations, and these water clocks became triumphs of the jeweler's art, a gift for kings. Therefore, like the sundial, they drifted into Rome, that vast maelstrom of the ancient world. Imagine a great walled city of low, flat-roofed buildings, with fronts and porches of great columns, a town mostly of stone, and much of it of marble, gleaming quite under the bright Italian sun, the streets thronged with men in tunics and togas, and here and there some person of importance driving by, standing erect in his chariot, drawn by four horses harnessed abreast, and statues everywhere, in the streets and about the buildings and in cool courtyards and gardens among green leaves. The ancients thought of sculpture as an outdoor thing, where we have one statue in the streets or public places of our cities, they had a hundred. We treasure the remains of them as artistic wonders in our museums, but they put them indoors and out as common ornaments and lived among them. Presently we hear of the Klepsidrae being used in Roman law courts by command of Pompey to limit the time of speakers. This, says one writer of the day, was to prevent babblings that such as spoke ought to be brief in their speeches. It is not difficult to picture some pompous and tiresome togud advocate rolling out sonorous Latin syllables as he cites precedents and builds up arguments, while an unseen dropping checks the time against him and to hear his indignant surprise and the chuckles of his auditors when the relentless water-clock cuts him short in the middle of some period. Marshall, the Latin poet, referring to a tiresome speaker who repeatedly moistened his throat from a glass of water during the lengthy speech, suggested that it would be an equal relief to him and to his audience if he were to drink from the Klepsidrae. But Roman lawyers were not guileless and sometimes, so we are told, they tampered with the mechanical regulation or else introduced muddy water, which would run out more slowly. This suggests one of the difficulties of the Klepsidrae. Still more serious was the fact that it would freeze on frosty nights. There were no purees among the ancient Romans. Polar exploration interested them not at all, but they did spread their conquests into regions of colder weather, as when Julius Caesar mentions, using the Klepsidrae to regulate the length of the night watches in Britain. His keen mind noted by this means that the summer nights in Britain were shorter than those at Rome, but now known to be due to difference of latitude. As late as the 9th century, a Klepsidrae was regarded as a princely gift. It is said that the good Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, beloved by all readers of the Arabian Nights, sent one of great beauty to Charlemagne, the Emperor of the West. Its case was elaborate, and at the stroke of each hour small doors opened to give passage to Cavaliers. After the 12th hour, these Cavaliers retired into the case. The striking apparatus consisted of small balls which dropped into a resounding basin underneath. The Klepsidrae appears to have been used throughout the Middle Ages in some European countries, and it lingered along in Italy and France down to the close of the 15th century. Some of these water clocks were plain tin tubes. Some were hollow cups, each with a tiny hole at the bottom, which were placed in water and gradually filled and sank in a definite space of time. When the Klepsidrae was introduced from Egypt into Greece and later into Rome, one was considered enough for each town and was set in the marketplace or some public square. It was carefully guarded by a civic officer who religiously filled it at stated times. The nobility of the town and the wealthy people sent their servants to find out the exact time, while the poorer inhabitants were informed occasionally by the sound of the horn which was blown by the attendant of the Klepsidrae to denote the hour of changing the guard. This was much in the spirit of the cause of the watchmen in Old England and later in our New England who were, in a way, walking clocks that shouted, 11 o'clock and all's well or whatever might be the hour. Allowing for the fact that the Klepsidrae was none too accurate at the best and that its reservoir must occasionally be refilled, it can be seen that this early form of timepiece, having played its part, was ready to step off the stage when a more practical successor should arrive. With one of its earliest successors we are familiar. End of Chapter 4 Recording by Linda Johnson Chapter 5 of Time Telling Through the Ages This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Time Telling Through the Ages by Harry Chase Brearley Chapter 5 How Father Time Got His Hourglass Every now and then one sees a picture of a lean old gentleman with a long white beard, flowing robes, and an expression of most misleading benignity. In spite of his look of kindly good humor, he is none too popular with the human race and his methods are not always of the gentlest. In one hand he carries the familiar scythe and in the other, the even more familiar hourglass. By this we may assume that he began to be pictured in this way while the hourglass was still in common use. The principle of the hourglass is so similar to that of the clepsidra and its first use was so early that it is somewhat of a misnomer to speak of it as a successor. About the only justification that can be made is that the clepsidra has long disappeared while the sandglass, if not the hourglass is still sold in the stores for such familiar uses as timing the boiling of eggs, the length of telephone conversations and other short-time needs. Nothing could be much simpler than the hourglass in which fine sand poured through a tiny hole from an upper into a lower compartment. It had none of the mechanical features of the later clepsidrae. It did not adjust itself to astronomical laws like the perfected sundials. It merely permitted a steady stream of fine sand to pass through an opening at a uniform rate of speed until one of the funnel-shaped bowls had emptied itself, then waited with entire unconcern until someone stood it upon its head and caused the sand to run back again. However, it possessed some very solid advantages of its own. It would not freeze. It would not spill over. It did not need refilling. It would run at a steady rate whether the reservoir were full or nearly empty. It could be made very cheaply and there was nothing about it to wear out. A water-clock might be of considerable size, but a sand-clock, since it required turning, must be kept small and an hourglass, a size small enough to carry, became popular, although its use was correspondingly limited. Thus it naturally was assigned to father-time to be carried before watches were available. A sundial simply would not answer this purpose, since the old gentleman works by night as steadily as by day. How old is the sand-glass? We do not know, definitely, but it is said to have been invented at Alexandria about the middle of the third century BC. That it was known in ancient Athens is certain for a Greek base-relief at the Mette Palace in Rome, representing a marriage, shows Morpheus, the god of dreams, holding an hourglass. The Athenians used to carry these timepieces as we do our watches. Some hourglasses contained mercury, but sand was an ideal substance for when fine and dry, it flows with an approximately constant speed whether the quantity is great or small, whereas liquids descend more swiftly the greater the pressure above the opening. Hourglasses were introduced into churches in the early 16th century when the preachers were famous for their wearisome sermons. The story is told of one of these long-winded divines who, on a hot day, had reached his tenthly just as the restless congregation were gladdened to see the last grains of sand fall from the upper bowl. Brethren, he remarked, let us take another glass, and he reversed it, as I was saying, and he went on for another hour. Other preachers, more merciful, used a half-hourglass and kept within its limits. Many churches were furnished with ornamental stands to hold the glass. These timekeepers lingered along in country churches for many years but ceased to be in anything like general demand after about 1650. For rough purposes of keeping time on board ship, sandglasses were employed, and it is curious to note that hour-and-half-hour glasses were used for this purpose in the British Navy as recently as the year 1839. The very baby of the hour-glass family was a 28-second affair which assisted in determining the speed of the vessel. The log-line was divided by knots at intervals of 47 feet, 3 inches, and this distance would go into a nautical mile as many times as 28 seconds would go into an hour. When the line was thrown overboard, the mariner counted the number of knots slipping through his fingers while his eyes were fixed on the tiny emptying sandglass, and in this way, so many knots an hour denoted the ship's speed in miles. In the British House of Commons, even at the present time, a two-minute glass is used in the preliminary to a division which is a method of voting wherein the members leave their seats into either the affirmative or negative lobbies. While the sand is running, division bells are set in motion in every part of the building to give members notice that a division is at hand. It was an ancient custom to put an hour-glass as an emblem that the sands of life had run out into coffins at burials. Another early means of recording time applied the principle of the consumption of some slow-burning fuel by fire. From remote ages the Chinese and Japanese thus used ropes knotted at regular intervals or cylinders of glue and sawdust marked in rings which slowly smoldered away. Alfred the Great, that noble English king of the ninth century, is said to have invented the candle-clock because of a vow to give eight hours of the day to acts of religion, eight hours to public affairs, and eight hours to rest and recreation. He had six tapers made each twelve inches long and divided into twelve parts or inches colored alternately black and white. Three of these parts were burned in one hour making each inch represent twenty minutes so that his six candles, lighted one after the other by his chaplains, would burn for twenty-four hours. The Eskimos also, through the long arctic night, have watched the lamp which gives both light and heat to their cold huts of snow. But all these are no more than crude conveniences whose irregularity is evident and there is likewise no need to do more than call attention to the effect upon fire in any form of wind or dampness in the air. The Roman lamp-clock sheltered from the weather was the best of them all and was the only one which long continued in civilized use. Our chief interest in all such devices comes from the touch of poetry still remaining in the tradition of the sacred flame which must be kept forever burning and in association of life and time with fire in such parables as that of the wise and foolish virgins. There is a reminder of this old timekeeping by fire in all that poetry and philosophy which tells of hope that still may live or of deeds that may be done while the lamp holds out to burn. Thus far, in spite of occasional glimpses of the Middle Ages and of modern times we have dealt for the most part with earlier ages. Now our story must leave these behind and thus passes the ancient world with its strange pagan civilization which was so human, so wise and so simple. It is difficult for modern Americans even to imagine existence in ancient Greece or Rome or in still more ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia since the whole attitude toward life was so essentially different from what it is today. Our debt to the ancients in this one matter of recording time is typical of that in many others. To them we owe our whole fundamental system and conception of it from the astronomy by which we measure our years and our seasons and make our appeal to the final standard of the stars down to the arithmetic of our minutes and seconds and the very names of our months and days. In the modern application and practical use of all this on the other hand we owe them nothing. They never made a clock or watch or any like device which has more than a merely ornamental use today. They gave us the general plan so well that we have never bettered it they left later generations to work out the details. They invented the second as a division of time but they did not measure by it. They did not care to try. For them learning was the natural right and power of the few and the gulf between the most that was known by the few and the little that was known in general was like the gulf between great wealth and great poverty among ourselves. Indeed, in this age of teaching and preaching when a thought seems to need only to be born in order to be spread abroad over the world it is hard for us even to conceive the instinct by which men kept their learning like a secret among the initiated and felt no impulse to make known that which they knew. Their great men thought and did wonderful things which are now the common property of us all and their common folk lived in a fashion astonishingly primitive by comparison in an ignorance which certainly was weakness and may somehow have been bliss. That world of theirs is gone the body and the spirit of it alike and there remains to us along with much of their art and their science the hourglass to symbolize that relentless flight of time which they feared but never tried to save and the quaint sundial in our gardens a memory of that worldly wise old philosophy which counted only the shining hours. End of Chapter 5 Recording by Linda Johnson Chapter 6 of Time Telling Through the Ages This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Tom Mack, Tucson, Arizona Time Telling Through the Ages by Harry Chase Beerley Chapter 6 The Clocks Which Named Themselves Now the scene changes again and the story shifts forward over the interval of a thousand years. As we take up the tale once more we find ourselves in another world amid a life as different from that ancient life of which we have been speaking as either of them is from our own life today. The ancient civilization which may be traced from Rome through Greece, Babylon and Egypt back to the dim dawn of history is gone almost as if it had never been. For there came a period when great hordes of barbarians defeated the armies, burnt the cities, pillaged and destroyed leaving only desolation and ruin behind them. Then followed hundreds of years of what we call the Dark Ages. Ages of ignorance and violence when mankind was slowly struggling upwards again and was forming a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. Therefore at the point we have now reached there are no more white temples and pillaged porticoes and sandaled men in white tunic and toga and marbled statues in green gardens but everywhere we find sharp roofs and towers quaint outlines and wild color like a child's picture book. There are castles with their moats and battlements and monasteries with their cloistered arches. There are knights in armor writing and lords and ladies gorgeous in strange garments and monks in their dull gowns and the sturdy peasant working in the field and in the towns all among peaked gables and gothic windows and rough cobbled streets a motley crowd of beggar and burger and courtier priest and clerk, doctor and scholar and soldier and merchant and tradesman and endless variety of types and each in the distinctive costume of his calling. And there are churches everywhere from the huge cathedral towering like a forest of carbon stone to the humble village chapel there are spires all pointing up to heaven in token of the change that has come upon the life and spirit of the world. We have come from the height of the classic period suddenly into the heart of the Middle Ages and in the dark centuries that lie between Christ and his disciples have come and gone and the religion of the western world has changed the old gods have perished and the saints have filled their places and Rome has died and romance has been born. The center of civilization has shifted to the north and west from the old ring of lands around the Mediterranean to the great nations of modern Europe Italy has become a jealous group of independent cities great in art and commerce but in little else. Germany is much the same except for the lack of some few-score centuries of tradition. France and Spain are already great in growing William the Conqueror has fought and ruled and died and the merry England of song and story has grown up out of the fusion of Saxon and Norman Chivalry and the Crusades, the times of Ivanhoe and the Talisman are as fresh as yesterday and by green hedgerows and hospitable ends Chaucer's pilgrims are plotting onward toward the sound of Canterbury's bells for here is the point of all our seeking that there are clocks now in the monasteries and in the cathedral towers there is just one curious link of likeness between the Middle Ages and the Remotor past as it was at first in Babylon although now in the 14th century the priesthood holds almost a monopoly of science and of learning thus although the sundial, clapsidra and sandglass are still much used we find ourselves at last in the time and lands of clocks the very sound of the word clock gives a clue to its origin it suggests the striking of our upon some bell the French called the word cloche and the Saxons cluga and both of those originally meant a bell if you will put yourself back in the picture at the beginning of the chapter you will find yourself in a realm of sounding, peeling, chiming bells with the hours of prayer throughout the day from Mattons to Angeles rung out from the bell freeze and with frequent deep-toned striking of the hour not even a blind man could have remained unconscious of the passage of the hours under such conditions and time in a sense became more a possession of democracy although timepieces themselves were still the mark of special privilege life was also beginning to hurry just a little very deliberate we should call it in comparison with the mad rush of the 20th century and yet it began to show its growing complexity in that humanity was becoming more definitely organized and men were forced to depend more and more upon each other in all of this there was a slightly growing sense of the things that were to be just as the water for some miles above Niagara begins to hasten its course under the influence of the mighty cataract over which it will at last go madly plunging herein occurs another of those baffling questions like the old time puzzler as to whether the hen first came from the egg or the egg from the hen one cannot help wondering to what extent the increasing accuracy of the broadening knowledge of timekeeping was the result of our complicated modern life and to what extent it was the cause certainly we cannot conceive of present day affairs as being conducted save in the light of moving hands and figures upon a dial from the middle ages then we get our word for clock and which is more important we begin to get some crude application of its modern mechanical principles they were wonderfully skillful those medieval workmen considering the means at their disposal and the ingenuity of some of their clocks is still a delight but perhaps for better understanding of the story we should stop for a minute to inquire exactly what a clock means from the mechanical point of view a clock is a machine keeping time and for this there are four essentials without any one of which there would be no clock first there must be motive power to make it run second there must be a means of transmitting this power third there must be a regulating device to make the mechanism move steadily and slowly and keep the motive power from running down too quickly and fourth there must be some device to mark the time and make it known in a typical modern clock the power comes from the pull of a weight or the pressure of a spring although clocks may of course be operated by electricity or compressed air or some other means also the regulator is what is known as the escapement and the recording device consists of the hands, the dial and the striking mechanism having stated this let us return to the past and see if we can determine how these principles came to be applied this is not altogether easy our forefathers were less particular than we over such trifling questions as names and spelling even the learned Shakespeare long afterward used several different spellings of his own name thus when we see in the records of the period the name of clock or horolodge we cannot tell with certainty what type is meant since horolodge meant simply a device for keeping time it might have applied equally well to a clock a chlacidra, an hourglass or even a sundial it is quite possible writes M. Gublin Breitschmidt the younger and eminent horologists of Lucerne Switzerland that a large number of the technical inventions of antiquity were lost during the migrations of the barbarians and under the chaotic conditions prevailing during the first thousand years of christianity but the most perfect surviving instrument for measuring time was the water clock known as eclipsedra which was able to maintain its supremacy long after the appearance of the holy mechanical clock just as the beautiful manuscripts of the artist monks and laymen were favored by the cultured classes long after the invention of movable types of printing the spread of christianity throughout europe caused the foundation of many religious communities and the severe rules by which they governed fixing the hours of prayer, labor and refreshment forced their members to seek instruments by which to measure time in the year 605 a bowl of pope subanias decreed that all bells be rung 7 times in the 24 hours at fixed moments and regularly and these fixed times became known as the 7 canical hours the sound of the bells penetrated and came to regulate not only the life of the religious bodies but also that of the secular people who lived outside the walls of the monasteries oil lamps, candles, our glasses, prayers and for those who had the means of buying them eclipsedra served as chronometers for the brotherhoods so that one can easily imagine that many a monk sought to improve these instruments but as yet no one had found the means to regulate the wheel system of a movement in the best instruments of this period water supplied the motive power and served well to regulate the action there is general belief that gerbert the monk who was a distinguished scholar of his age and who later became Pope Sylvester II was the one who took the important step of producing a real clock and that this occurred near the close of the 10th century or to be more exact about 990 AD this period was one of densest superstition and expectancy of the end of the world was in the air people had fixed upon the year 1000 AD as the date of that cataclysmic event authorities of the church and of the state were not very partial to invention and research their attention being fixed largely upon theological political or military affairs but of course inquiring and constructive minds were still to be found even without encouragement these tended to follow the impulse of their natures it is to the monks in their cloisters that we chiefly owe the preservation of learning through the dark ages and from the monks for the most part came such progress of science and invention as was made if gerbert the monk after patient tinkering with wheels and weights in his donewald workshop really achieved some form of the clock action as we know it he was one of the great benefactors of the human race still it is not impossible that his device may have only been a more remarkable application of the clip sedra principle whatever it was it seems to have startled the authorities for they are said to have accused him of having practice sorcery through league with the devil and to have banished him for a time from france his age appears to have had a vast respect for the intellectual powers of his satanic majesty anything which was too ingenious or scientific to be understood without an uncomfortable degree of mental application was very apt to be ascribed to diabolic inspiration and thus found unfit for use in christian lands it could hardly have been a stimulating atmosphere for would be inventors all of the credit that we are ascribing to gerbert must therefore be prefixed with an if did he really invent the clock movements or is this merely another of the tales which have blown down to us from the age of tradition and romance for similar tales are told of pacificus in 849 AD of the early pope subanias in 612 and even of bothias the philosopher as far back as 510 AD while always in the background of the claims of priority for the chinese who are supposed to have discovered many of our most important mechanical and scientific principles a way off upon the other side of the world before these were dreamed of in the west if all of these various claims were true which is far from likely it still would not need to surprises we remember that humanity until within the past few generations was more or less a collection of separated units and its records were very incomplete there was scant interest in abstract research and very limited intercourse between towns and countries one who made an important discovery in one locality might be unheard of a hundred miles away all the conditions were favorable his ideas might even pass from memory with his death until some scholar of modern times might chance upon their record all that can be said with certainty therefore is that there were clocks of some sort in the monasteries during the 11th century that back of these were the eclipsedra and other time recording devices and that here and there through the preceding centuries are more or less believable tales of inventions that had to do with the subject let it be remembered too that some of the brilliant minds of ancient times made discoveries that were forgotten after the barbarian waves overwhelmed preceding generations the ages following the downfall of Rome were those of intellectual darkness illiteracy and rude force until mankind groped slowly back toward the light through the process of rediscovery thus it mattered not at all to the medieval world that Archimedes the great Greek scientist and engineer who however chance to live in the Greek colony of Sicily was able somewhere about 200 BC to construct a system of revolving spheres which reproduced the motion of the heavenly bodies such a machine must necessarily have involved some sort of clockwork we dare not stop to consider Archimedes lest we stray too far from our subject but this marvelous man of ancient times the Benjamin Franklin of his day seems to have had a hand in almost every sort of scientific research from discovering the principle of specific gravity in order to checkmate a dishonest goldsmith to destroying Roman warships by means of his scientific engines the story is told that he set the ships on fire by concentrating upon them the rays of the sun from a number of concave mirrors and although this story may not be true the things he is known to have done are extraordinary Archimedes and his knowledge had long passed away when the monastery clocks of the 11th century began to sound the hour these were the fruit of a crude new civilization just struggling for expression and represented the general period when William the Conqueror led his Norman army into England End of Chapter 6 Recording by Tom Mack Tucson, Arizona